Lesli Dalaba + Fred Frith + Eric Glick Rieman + Carla Kihlstedt

(Accretions, 2003)

This improv project is a first-time session by three Bay area musicians: composer and multi-instrumentalist Eric Glick Rieman, who initiated this meeting, plays prepared and extended Fender Rhodes electric piano; celebrated guitarist and composer Fred Frith, who had worked Glick Rieman at the Mills College; Tin Hat Trio and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum violinist Carla Kihlstedt: and former New York downtown player, now Seattle-based trumpeter Lesli Dalaba.
All four musicians demonstrate their inimitable attitudes and sensibilities towards their instruments, as if they are not playing in the most conservative sense of this concept but preferring to put their instruments through strange and unpredictable treatments, manipulations and effects, a kind of very free and experimental playful playing. Such an attitude might result in a very serious, academic exercise, but with their shared sense of adventure, idiosyncratic languages and high level of focused interaction, the end result is quite fascinating.
There is no leader on the session. All four musicians work to make form from improvisation, most of the time leaving the pieces without a specific shape until they have exhausted their ideas. Frith, as one might expect, plays all over the guitar, using its strings as a kind of percussion instrument, scratching them and producing sometimes distorted, bluesy lines. Dalaba explores her extended breath control technique, blowing otherworldly long chords and adding her "maniacal laughter" to "Lucy Has A New Pet Kitty." Glick Rieman produces ambient, drone-like sounds from his Rhodes piano, and Kihlstedt proves that she is one of the most promising improvisers to emerge from the Bay area, pushing the range of her violin through high pitch pizzicato plucking as if it were a strange transformation of a Japanese koto, then moving into folk-style playing. Fifty-five minutes of unusual, challenging, exceptional and strange sounds, but most of the time beautiful music.

Andrey Henkin (All About Jazz)

HERE